Paul Gilmartin wrote:
>z/OS shirks the issue by making user address spaces non- dispatchable
>during a leap second.

That's one option, the less commonly chosen one. You would choose this 
option if you need your z/OS environment to have highly accurate time that 
fully reflects the leap second the instant it occurs. You might be in this 
situation if your z/OS environment directly supports a financial trading 
exchange open across UTC leap second insertion, for example. [Maybe. The 
exchange presumably would have to halt trading for one second.(*)] This 
one second "pause the world" behavior is to avoid creating UTC time stamps 
that would be duplicates and/or incomprehensible to practically the 
world's entire catalog of leap second ignorant software, possibly 
including parts of z/OS itself.

The other, more popular option is to steer across the leap second. That's 
a Server Time Protocol option, and it takes about 7 hours to adjust to the 
one second delta.

>z/VM?

Short answer: use the popular option (steer across). Longer and fantastic 
answer: see Alan Altmark's excellent article.

http://www.vm.ibm.com/devpages/altmarka/vmleap.html

(*) This scenario vaguely reminds me of Japanese ATM networks (in 
convenience stores typically) that publicly advertise 12:01 AM to 11:59 PM 
service availability. I think they still do that. For whatever reason(s) 
the network needs a brief scheduled outage across midnight every night, 
and in Japan at least that 60 or 120 second daily planned outage is 
advertised lest anyone panic that their first ATM transaction attempt 
didn't work. It's entirely possible that 1 or 2 minute planned outage is 
no longer technically required, but changing the published SLA might 
be..."difficult." :-)

- - - - - - - - - -
Timothy Sipples
I.T. Architect Executive
Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions
IBM Z & LinuxONE
- - - - - - - - - -
E-Mail: [email protected]



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